I know that someone somewhere else has explained to everyone that the "casualties" we experience within the HPS and Battleground games are composite reflections of men killed, wounded, missing and captured. That's obviously the case, because if the historical kill counts were as high as our game casualty counts, the war would have certainly ended two years earlier or more than it did simply from a horrendous loss of men! (McClellan lost under 1500 men killed throughout the entire Pennisula Campaign!)
But I have some misgivings about how the casualty figures are manipulated within the campaign games, wherein a re-appearing unit that suffered casualties in a preceeding battle always seems to come back in the next battle in the same, near-depleted condition. Time between battles would seem to be the limiting factor in this, as one would ordinarily expect a returning unit to have little of no change in its strength, if the former battle was only days or maybe a week previous. But you'd expect to see some strength return, if the previous battle were two or more weeks old in game time, and then thereafter for longer periods on some sort of acceptable ratio. I'll admit that I haven't kept imperical records for this sort of thing and that my observations are casual at best. But it would certainly stamp our contests with a bit more of historical realism, if the program could at least provide us with a distinction of casualties and then be able to use that information factored with game time to more nearly portray a unit's manpower.
Also, as a post script to this, I have notice on rare occasions that a low strength unit, say 80 to 50 men, might completely disappear in a game, if it suddenly sustains a hard casualty hit less than its entire strength!
_________________ General Jos. C. Meyer, ACWGC Union Army Chief of Staff Commander, Army of the Shenandoah Commander, Army of the Tennessee (2011-2014 UA CoA/GinC)
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